Why Immigration helps U.S. economy grow

From today's Business Week columnist Chris Farrell talking about the benefit of immigration proving that immigrants like Sergey Brin, Google founder pictured above are the very heart of the American system.

"For example, a quarter of the engineering and technology companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005 had at least one founder who was foreign-born, according to research by scholars Vivek Wadhwa, Annalee Saxenian, Ben Rissing, and Gary Gereffi. In Silicon Valley, America's epicenter of technological innovation, the percentage of immigrant-founded startups reached 52 percent of total new companies over the same period.

The scholars also calculate that foreign nationals living in the U.S. were named as inventors or co-inventors in 24 percent of all international patent applications filed in the U.S. in 2006. That's up from 7 percent in 1998. The influx of highly-skilled workers from India, Asia, Latin America, and other corners of the world is also a boon to U.S. exports."